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I hired movers and saw Julia settled into her new suite, overlooking a garden of red tulips. Three days later, I returned to the empty house to collect the last remnants of our life. I found Eric sitting on the stairs, looking small, defeated. He had finally noticed the silence. He tried to protest that I had “moved his mother,” but I corrected him: I had moved all of us. When he tried to deny the affair, I cut him off. I described the scene at Romano’s in vivid detail—the laughter, the toasting, the hand-holding.
Eric tried to claim it was a mistake, but I told him it was a series of a thousand choices. Every night he stayed out while I cared for his mother was a choice. Every lie about a late meeting was a choice. He had let me break myself for his family so he could feel important elsewhere. Now, he was free to be that person. I told him his mother and his children knew everything, and then I walked out of the house for the last time.
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